The exercise was part of a week's worth of lessons using the 41-by-31-foot physical map of Asia, complete with mountains and rivers along with national borders. Snider had to trade rooms with a colleague to fit the map, but even then, the corners were curled up because space was too tight.

"The biggest part of this map is that it's something different and something they're not used to seeing," said Snider, explaining why she asked National Geographic to ship the hulking map and a silver trunk full of educational materials to her.

Snider, a Fulbright-Hays Scholar, also spent a week this summer writing lesson plans for National Geographic for other classroom projects.

She said that when her students first saw the map last week their mouths were agape. "It gets them excited about learning," she said.

The map is also designed to stimulate students visually and kinesthetically. Just three in 10 eighth-grade students achieved a "solid academic performance" on geography in 2001, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a demographically representative test that is often referred to as the nation's report card.

Snider's class dabbled in math as well as geography during the 50-minute lesson. A few minutes after guessing the world's population, the students stood, in their stocking feet, by placards representing the seven continents. She asked them to guess how much of the world's population lived on each continent.

They grabbed the number of red cups that corresponded to the answer. The students standing on the placard for Asia had to count through 60 cups to represent 60 percent, while the group assigned to Australia and Oceania had only one.

To delve further into concepts like population distribution and density, students stacked cups to show what percentage of Asia's population lived in selected countries.

After the bell rang, the students padded out of class on their way to lunch. "We usually use those tiny little maps," Iman Ali, 12, said. "You don't get that much visual stuff."